Why is my TiVo different???

I see the people using the TiVos on TV and they always look different from mine. Much cooler, and I want my TiVo to look like that. We've had 3 TiVos and they have all just had the green or blue foggy background, I want what I'm seeing on the TiVos on TV.

Does anybody have anything other than the plain blue and green foggy backgrounds on their TiVos? Is this a firmware issue? I also want to get my TiVo to do all this cool new stuff like TiVo to go, but I can't get my firmware to upgrade. Should I have bought the TiVo-brand TiVo box?

I want the cool features that it looks like everybody else has, for music, video over IP, and pictures. I have the network adapter and it's plugged into the network, but I don't have the network options in my menu, even after rebooting the TiVo.

From the System Information thingy: (I think these may be the important ones)
Brand: 100 (don't know what the heck that means)
IRD Model: R52180
DVR Service Level: P:- (don't know what that means either)

From the System Information thingy: (I think these may be the important ones)
Brand: 100 (don't know what the heck that means)
IRD Model: R52180
DVR Service Level: P:- (don't know what that means either)

Click to expand...

First six or so digits of your TSN is what we need.

What's it look like? What color? Does it have a "nightlight" front panel?

The "nightlight" one is a standalone TiVo. It works with any input (cable, over-the-air, satellite) by recording (in analog form) whatever you plug into it via either RF (coaxial) or composite (red-white-yellow or red-white-S-Video).

It's metallic silver, does not have the "nightlight" front panel. It says DIRECTV DVR R10 on the front and it has an over-sized door for the card thingy.
TSN (starts with): 521-0001

Click to expand...

The DirectTV Tivo won't have any of those cool features you're after, and from what I've read, they don't plan on adding any of them. They are only on the "stand alone" TIVO units, they work with cable and sattellite but don't have any directTV hardware in them (no directTV logo on the front).

so the Tivo-brand ones can do exactly what mine does, and more? Do I need anything extra to get them to do what my DirectTiVo box is doing now?

Click to expand...

Well, not exactly all yours can do. A stand-alone TiVo only has one tuner, so it can only record one show at a time. However, DirectTV determines exactly which of the TiVo features their units will support and so you will not be getting many of the new features in that unit.

You can hack any Series 2 DirecTivo to do all that a standalone tivo will do, including the networking, sharing programs, pulling programs off to burn on dvd, playing music and showing pictures off your computer, etc.. etc..